How many of these Meta values should be included in the Head tag?

[theideapeople]

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Hi.

We receive advice to include so many Meta values in the Head Tag on each page.  Which ones are really needed and are really valuable in the SEO effort?

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Thank you for your help and ideas!

Jay

[theideapeople]

Thank you, both, for the help! Jay

[RyanKent]

I mostly agree with Ryan but will offer one correction. "Revisit after" is not used at all. If I recall correctly, the concept was created by a single small search engine many years ago and was never accepted by any major search engine.

Meta tags can be created and used by anyone. For example, the "AlexaVerifyID" tag most likely is used only by Alexa and has no value to Google nor anyone else.

I prefer to perform Google site verifications by adding a file to the server rather then adding code. In my opinion code should be as lean and pure as possible and most of these tags are unnecessary. With that said, any particular software COULD make use of any tags so I would not blindly remove tags without consulting the site developer.

A simple example. I had a client with a Joomla site. I removed the meta keywords tag since we all know the tag has no value, right? Well the site's developer used the keywords tag as part of the "tagging" system so when I removed the meta tag the site functionality was impacted.

[AdoptionHelp]

You can get rid of keywords because its deprecated. You can also get rid of googlebot and robots meta tags, as those are the default crawl directives (make sure you don't have a robots.txt that contradicts this). Revisit after is nice, but unnecessary because robots only consider it a suggestion. These are all unnecessary IMO: city, state, zip, country, subject, author, copyright, distribution, rating, generator, abstract.

I don't know what ICBM and DC.title are. The rest are verification codes, you only need them if you're actually going to use the services.